A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE ELECTION campaign has been pretty clean so far, and, considering the pessimism which lies heavily on the Labour ranks, I find this mildly surprising. The temptation to bring some imaginary bogey out of the cupboard must have been very strong, and indeed in certain wild and woolly quarters there have been attempts to parallel the 'Whose finger of the trigger?' stroke with 'Whose hand on the H-bomb?' But the leaders of the Labour Party and their more respectable sup- porters have heroically resisted the temptation to pretend that their policy on the H-bomb and the Conservatives' are anything but identical. The one who has come'closest to slipping is Mr. Herbert Morrison, who slyly injected a little poison into his broadcast on Saturday. 'I believe,' said he, 'that the Conserva- tives are taking a very dangerous line about the hydrogen bomb.' Since he hurried on to say that the Labour Party agrees that Britain must have it and must never allow the Russians to believe that we shall never use the bomb unless they use it first, I found it difficult to discern the `dangerous line.' AIL but he added that the Defence White Paper 'could be taken to mean that if the Russians start any kind of aggression anywhere, we might reply by dropping hydrogen bombs on Moscow.' Of course it could be taken to mean that—by anyone with a memory so short that he has forgotten the far-ranging debate on the White Paper. `I can't believe,' said Mr. Morrison, `that the Conservatives really mean that.' Since Mr. Morrison knows as well as Mr. Macmillan (and as well as Mr. Attlee for that matter) that the Conservatives emphatically do not mean that, he had to stoop pretty low to get that particular poison into his listengre ears.
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